Announced on Dec 13 2007, Columbia University Libraries has become the 28th academic institution to sign contracts with Google to digitize those book titles in the Columbia Libraries which are in the public domain or are not otherwise under copyright protection.

Read the press release here from Columbia announcing this union. Here is an excerpt which describes the wide-reaching scope of the project:

“The Columbia University Libraries collections contain a remarkable range of books on a wide variety of subjects and dozens of languages from 25 distinct libraries. Among the hundreds of collections that are being considered for digitization are areas in which Columbia has particularly strong holdings, for instance architecture from the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library; political science, sociology, and environmental science from the Lehman Social Sciences Library; Area Studies collections of history and literature materials from Eastern Europe, Central and South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin and South America; or East Asian languages and history from the C. V. Starr East Asian Library. Their inclusion will extend and enrich the scope of the materials available through Google Book Search.“